VII. Chiefdoms and Megacommunities: On the Stability of Non-State Hierarchies

For a long time, Western anthropologists accepted Elman Service’s neo-evolutionist sequence of four stages for classifying social development, the pinnacle being the state, of course. The penultimate stage, the chiefdom, was generally argued to be an unstable political formation, lending more credence to the assumption that state evolution was inevitable, in this instance due to the inconveniences and imperfections of the previous stage of political organization.

In recent years, this sequence has been problematized; for one, because chiefdoms in many parts of the world have proven highly resilient in resisting the imposition of state power, remaining intact up until the present day, even though they nominally fall within the presumed borders of one or several states.

Chiefdoms appear more durable and stable than was originally envisaged by neo-evolutionist thinking. Not only have they survived into the present age but, in countries where the state has collapsed or failed to discharge its most minimal responsibilities, chiefdoms are increasingly taking over a more overtly political function, buttressing the important social and cultural role they have always played. Not surprisingly, the partizans of chiefdom stress longevity and consensual patterns of decision-making as two of the most crucial characteristics of this form of political arrangement.[96]

The false supposition of instability in chiefdoms can be chalked up to an unexamined ethnocentrism that causes scientists to place importance on an element that their own culture emphasizes. Westerners often make the mistake of assigning paramount importance to masculine, formal leaders, and many chiefdoms regularly produce political alliances that tend to fall apart, especially after their most charismatic figure dies. But perhaps the process of fission as much as that of fusion is an essential part of the society in question; perhaps structures and relationships that only exist at a village or local level are far more important in the actual functioning of the society than the figure of a paramount chief.

Not only are chiefdoms more durable than assumed, they also resist classification within a continuum that ends with the formation of a state. Many chiefdoms throughout history grew in size and complexity not by transitioning to statehood, but by forming “megacommunities” that could include millions of members, without relying on the centralized, coercive, and administrative structures that define statehood.

Understanding how and why some chiefdoms acted as stepping stones to state formation, whereas others experienced political growth without developing the states that supposedly accompany such growth, and still others resisted (and in some cases continue to resist) the transition to statehood or the development of state power, can shed some light on some of the dynamics of state formation.

In sum, and repeating what is now a common theme, it seems that it was less the outward forms (what could be traced as an organizational schema by an outside observer) and more the internal ethos that guided these transitions.

The Haudenosaunee, also known as the Iroquois or Six Nations, are organized in an intertribal confederation of six different nations (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora). “This system incorporated six widely dispersed and unique nations of thousands of agricultural villages and hunting grounds from the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River to the Atlantic, and as far south as the Carolinas and inland Pennsylvania,” in the words of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. [97] Before colonization, the stateless confederation comprised complex forms of village, intervillage, and intertribal organization, preceding contact with Europeans by several centuries. During the period of colonization, the Haudenosaunee welcomed the Tuscarora, a coastal tribe fleeing warfare, and engaged in alternating strategies of trading, alliance, and armed resistance to keep the colonizers at bay. They were eventually forced to live on reservations and adopt tribal governments, though traditionalist members of the Six Nations continue to fight for autonomy, reclaiming their land and blockading different forms of economic exploitation. [98]

Gord Hill notes that Mohawk armed resistance at Oka, where Canadian settlers were trying to build a golf course on their land “set the tone for indigenous resistance all throughout the 90s.” [99] Much of this resistance occurred in conflict with the “Indian Act chiefs” and tribal governments.

Before colonization, the confederation was “characterized by a complicated and efficient system of organization of the society, which functioned, however, without any bureaucratic government institutions, retaining its egalitarian traditions and having no pronounced hierarchy.” The alliance that formed the “Iroquois League” preserved peace between the nations and gave them an advantage in warfare against hostile neighbors, a capacity that proved especially necessary after the arrival of the Europeans. Decisions concerning all the nations were made in a league council, celebrated periodically or irregularly. The council comprised a number of sachems, hereditary delegates from each tribe. The sachem could not propose or accept a decision without the approval of the population, and the council itself made decisions by consensus. “A decision to be made was first discussed in a clan by the women, and then the warriors held a meeting.” [100] A new sachem was first nominated by the women, based on his personal qualities, and then ratified by the chiefs and elders at a meeting of the whole tribe.

The sachem had no special authority in wartime, and the chiefs who functioned as military leaders enjoyed an authority “based on their military merits alone.” The organization of groups of warriors was non-hierarchical. Villages also had their own councils, in which local elders (Agokstenha among the Mohawk) played a special role, though the councils were open and anyone could speak.[101]

Within the alliance, individual communities and tribes retained their autonomy, their traditions, and their decision-making practices. In addition to political unification for reasons of peace and warfare, the Haudenosaunee also engaged in a high level of coordination and exchange in cultural and economic matters, but the communities and households (the “lower levels” of the confederation, within a Western optic) retained their organizational powers in these affairs.

The Haudenosaunee peoples avoided centralized power by means of a clan-village system of democracy based on collective stewardship of the land. Corn, the staple crop, was stored in granaries and distributed equitably in this matrilineal society by the clan mothers, the oldest women from every extended family. [102]

Extended families lived together in collective, matrilocal “longhouses.”

The political unification of the Haudenosaunee, in large part for reasons of warfare, did not in any way constitute a step towards state formation or greater internal hierarchy. This fact disproves determinist theories about the organization of warfare provoking politogenesis. Warfare does not cause state formation, as I have already argued; rather, preexisting hierarchies can use warfare to justify and accelerate state formation. A resolutely anti-authoritarian society like the Six Nations can effectively organize itself for warfare without increasing internal hierarchies. Another demonstration of the anti-authoritarian character of their organization at all levels is the fact that the league council, the sachem, and other spaces or agents of political power did not evolve into the posterior tribal governments. On the contrary, British and American colonizers had to break the political unity of the Haudenosaunee and end the practice of the league council in order to fully subjugate and colonize the Six Nations. And in contradiction to Vorobyov, the white anthropologist I have quoted, the Haudenosaunee did not “fall in the late 18th century.” [103] They continue to exist, practicing autonomous forms of existence where they can, and still fighting against the imposition of authority, as the quotations from Gord Hill indicate.

Nonetheless, they were subjected to genocidal policies, particularly by white settlers acting as paramilitaries for the colonizing states. George Washington, the foremost slave owner of Britain’s colonies in North America, ordered an army under his command to sow “terror” and “lay waste” to all the Haudenosaunee towns, “that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed” and he instructed his subordinate to refuse “any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected.” [104] Such are the tactics of the State.

In the sixteenth century, the Powhatan confederacy arose in the lands just west of the Chesapeake Bay. Powhatan was able to replace chiefs of lesser chiefdoms with his close relatives. Such a maneuver constituted a great coup, given that a chief appointed from without contradicts the logic of the chiefdom, which is ostensibly a group of related people tied to a specific community. He was able to achieve this with the specter of his status and power as a ruler, in a context when the incursions of external enemies made the partial loss of autonomy seem preferable to the threat of extinction. One must also ask if within those subordinate chiefdoms, the people saw Powhatan’s representatives as their rulers or as mere emissaries. The partial loss of autonomy of these subordinate chiefdoms, and the presence of a paramount chief, suggests that the Powhatan confederacy was following a different path than the Six Nations to the north. However, the different communities of the Chesapeake Bay were almost entirely annihilated by the insatiable English within a hundred years, making it impossible to know if in time they would have developed a state of their own.

All the nomadic empires of the Eurasian steppes—those of the Turks, the Huns, the Mongols, and the Uighurs—used a similar system. Lacking a bureaucratic principle of authority, paramount rulers sent their comrades-in-arms or their relatives to govern provinces, dependent tribes, and allied chiefdoms. Each of these groups was largely self-sufficient and autonomous, with their own structures of internal organization, but they presumably tolerated the representative of the central authority as a way to maintain their alliance and avoid hostilities. On the whole, the duties required by the central authority were mutual self-defense and military discipline: limiting raiding and offensive warfare to the enemies of the central polity. Such an alliance tended to come with few obligations beyond ritual gifts and obeisance, and provided the benefits of protection from powerful state neighbors and the booty from successful raiding.

All the “nomadic empires” (actually tribal confederations) formed as neighbors to large sedentary states: whether Han China, the Byzantine Empire, or the Roman Empire. The Turkic tribal confederation was born out of an independence struggle, whereas the Hsiung-nu, contemporaries of the Han dynasty, were composed in part of runaways and refugees from state power. The nomads achieved an autonomous subsistence in the steppes thanks to their large herds, which determined their nomadism, as they regularly had to move on to fresh pasture. However, nomadic communities that relied exclusively on their own pastoral products could not hope to escape material poverty. To complement their resources, they had to raid or trade with sedentary neighbors. [105] But when those sedentary neighbors were states, they tried to control commerce with the aim of dominating the nomads. Whereas raiding by nomads was not typically a factor in the formation of sedentary states, the expansionist tendencies of a powerful state did encourage an imperialistic evolution among the tribal confederations. The backbone of a nomadic empire was the extensive military hierarchy that definitively constituted a state at the point when the nomads took over a sedentary state, using clan representatives to quickly establish a bureaucracy. The post-nomadic bureaucracy, however, attached itself like a parasite to the preexisting bureaucracies of the sedentary state. Officials of the nomadic empire oversaw the continued functioning of the sedentary state, making sure that a part of already ongoing exploitative processes went to the enrichment of the nomadic military hierarchy.

Speaking of barbarian invasions of Europe, Tymowski writes:

the transformation of the invaders’ tribal organization into a state organization was relatively fast. This was because it took place in an area where a state organization had already been operating for a long time, and the local organization patterns, economic potential, and—despite the destruction—also the demographic potential, were all at hand, ready for use. [106]

The states of the great nomadic empires tended to be short-lived, perhaps in part due to the nomads’ anti-civilizational imaginary, and their disdain for sedentary life and bureaucratic functions. “‘All cities must be razed’ Ghenghis Khan used to say, ‘so that the world may once again become a great steppe in which Mongol mothers will suckle free and happy children.’” [107]

In Europe, many tribes resisted Christianization and the imposition of state authority for centuries, whereas tribes like the Franks that had undergone a process of militarization and adopted, at least in part, the culture of the Roman Empire, established states by suppressing the autonomous existence of different tribes, first subordinating and then replacing local chiefs, eventually abolishing the tribal customs to allow for bureaucratic administration.

Quite the contrary, in sub-Saharan Africa, states and tribes coexisted indefinitely Tymowski writes

Many states in Black Africa disintegrated and collapsed not only as the result of invasions, but also due to internal processes. The phenomenon of state fragmentation, and return to tribal organizations in the former state’s area was well known in Africa […] The tribes, despite the existing possibilities, did not always transform themselves into states […] Moreover, until the end of the pre-colonial period, the establishment and development of states was far from being a one-way process […] On the contrary, this process was often reversible, and several states fell apart in tribal organizations. [108]

The Benin megacommunity of the Upper Guinea coast of western Africa began as a network of localized communities linked by a common language, Bini, and not by any formal relationships or administrative structures. Bini communities sustained themselves through communal agriculture, performed jointly by the extended family group, and by hunting and gathering, from the end of the first millennium BCE through the first millennium CE. The archaeological record suggests that the Kwa, the ethno-linguistic predecessors of the Bini, were foragers at the beginning of the first millennium BCE when they moved into the region. The autochthonous inhabitants of the forest belt, whom they named the Efa, already practiced hoe agriculture and lived in stable villages, practices the proto-Bini eventually adopted. The two ethnolinguistic groups coexisted for centuries before the Bini integrated the Efa into a joint cultural system in which the Efa constituted a less prestigious tier. Eventually they were assimilated through intermarriage, though those who identify as descendants of the Efa “hold some quite important priestly posts within the Benin system” of religious and political institutions. [109]

Within this process arose the extended family system that has remained relatively constant throughout their social evolution. Perhaps the extended tracing of family ties allowed for both integration and differentiation in a dual-tiered ethnopolitical system characterized by a weak cultural hierarchy, intermarriage, and coexistence, that eventually led to assimilation. In other words, the further someone mapped their sanguinary relations, the more likely they could connect themselves to both Bini and Efa, whereas in a system of either nuclear families or delineated clans, each particular group could more effectively preserve the illusion of belonging to one ethnicity or the other. The family structure, however, was not a cause of this ethos of coexistence, since it seems to have arisen after the two groups came into contact.

In contrast, we can consider the evolution of Aryan society in the Indian subcontinent. Upon initial contact with the autochthonous inhabitants, the Aryans viewed the locals with disgust, and applied a practice of domination and subordination. In their case, the result of a dual-tiered ethnopolitical system was a complex caste society that encouraged the development of a powerful state.

What we do know is that the extended family system in Bini society was and continues to be closely linked to agricultural practices. The extended family can better approach economic subsistence than a nuclear family, therefore not leaving organizational gaps that emerging administrative institutions could fill. On the other hand, it is not so large as a clan, and not so suited for a redistributive economy that would allow the concentration of wealth.

Bini families are divided into three age-grades, with male elders enjoying political leadership, backed by an ancestor cult (since elders are seen as the intermediaries with the ancestors). The elders form a community council and appoint the oldest member as a ceremonial leader. Significantly, no extended family amasses power over the other families, because membership in the council includes all families, and leadership in the council effectively rotates from one family to another. Extended families also have their own councils, and in communities of a single extended family, a member of every nuclear family is present in the council. The councils decide on the use of communal lands, preserve traditions, mediate infractions of community laws, and worship deities and ancestors on behalf of the entire community. In turn, they traditionally receive gifts of a “prestigious and ritual character” though for their subsistence they have to depend on their families. Public assemblies of all community members were probably also practiced in earlier centuries. [110]

The Bini experienced a concentration of political power beginning in the middle of the first century CE. Before that, multiple communities sometimes coordinated their activities with temporary councils presided over by the most senior elder; however, such unions were temporary and never infringed on the autonomy of individual communities. Subsequently, chiefdoms appeared in which a privileged family (and, most immediately, its leaders) had the prerogative of representing and thus governing other families. That family’s community of origin thus gained preeminence over other communities in the alliance. In some cases, the leaders of a chiefdom extended their rule to a weaker chiefdom, though in general this was accomplished not through military conquest but by the paramount leader adopting “supernatural airs” and successfully arguing a divine right to rule. Significantly, independent communities and egalitarian community unions were able to coexist alongside the chiefdoms. Another mixture has also survived into the present day: in some communities, the position of priest to a specific deity is inherited (a characteristic typically associated with greater hierarchy and the accumulation of power) whereas other communities still hold to the traditional practice in which priests must be appointed their specific roles by the council. [111]

The rise of chiefdoms coincided with the appearance of iron-working technologies, an intensification of agriculture, and a rise in population leading to a population density potentially higher than in the present day. The material conditions of this explosion might lead some to expect a militaristic turn in social organization; however, though the clearing of forests and the hunger for arable land sometimes led to violent competitions, “the unification of the Bini communities was peaceful” and the population pressures did not provoke the development of a militarily effective system of political organization. [112]

These pressures did not, of course, lack consequences. The new chiefdoms began to legitimize a new figure of profane leadership, the onogie, who complemented the spiritual leadership of the council of elders. The first enegie were warriors from the second age-grade who distinguished themselves as leaders on the battlefield. “All this was a blow to the gerontocratic principle of management among the Bini.” [113]

Cities arose as a consequence “and an aspect” of the rise of chiefdoms, in a complex process of mutually influencing factors. The leaders of a chiefdom privileged their community of origin over the other communities, and tried to organize the communities within an agricultural enclosure delineated by ditches and earthworks. Such an evolution both required and favored population growth and intensified agriculture, while also providing defensive advantages in warfare, which increased in tandem with the other factors (since Bini unification was peaceful, as mentioned, warfare was primarily waged against raiders from neighboring societies or groups of Efa that defied assimilation). The agricultural enclosure quickly filled in to constitute a city of up to a couple of thousand people, in the earlier period of this evolution. Subordinate family groups then went out to form settlements associated with the chiefdom-city, and these settlements grew in turn.

At least ten different proto-cities, backed by 130 chiefdoms “and a great many independent communities” aligning with one or another of these proto-cities, competed for cultural predominance and recognition as the “sacral-ritual center.” In the first centuries of the second millennium CE Benin City won out and the other centers shrank back “down to the level of big villages.” This marked the beginning of a monarchic period in which the many chiefdoms were politically united by a paramount ruler, claiming the title of Ogiso (“rulers from the sky”). These rulers were likely Yoruba warriors who came in raiding parties from the north. The son or grandson of the first Ogiso, Ere, is credited with many innovations and institutions, particularly “symbols of royalty and objects of the ancestor cult,” with moving the seat of his government to Benin City, having a palace built there that measured a half mile by a quarter mile, and opening a central market in front of the palace. He and his brothers are credited with leading the formation of many new settlements. Forty craft unions were also said to have been initiated in his reign, and the leaders of the unions eventually played important roles in government administration. Ere’s son, however, was the last ruler in the dynasty. After failing to impose his leadership, he abdicated and left the country, returning to Ife (the land of his forebears). However, two or three generations of rule by foreign war leaders was enough to establish the tradition of a paramount ruler governing the whole country. The next twenty Ogiso were “representatives of different local, Bini chiefdoms” who all failed to establish their own dynasty. The last of them died in misery after being banished for being autocratic and not “consulting his advisers.” [114]

The leaders of this supra-chiefdom polity were typically leaders from specific communities who were able to govern on the basis of charisma but were never able to create the institutional framework and coercive authority necessary to centralize political power and establish a state. They were little more than primus entre pares, first among equals, although such an ethos would not be antithetical to state formation in the democratic pathway of politogenesis.

In fact, when the monarchy was abolished in the twelfth century, Benin City was governed as a republic, and the city itself almost broke up, as many people desired a return to the more egalitarian, albeit gerontocratic, system of community councils. Two symbolic leaders of the republic wished to found their own dynasties, one after the other. The first was prevented from doing so by popular pressure, but the second was enthroned and aided by the leaders of Benin City, who had succeeded in extending their authority well beyond the city and across all Benin during the earlier reign of the Ogiso, whom they used as a “screen” for their own authority. They desired “the restoration of the supreme all-Benin authority” and to this end they invited a foreign ruler from Ife to ascend the throne and bring “peace and concord.” The heads of the Benin City chiefdom “hoped to control the foreigner” and to preserve the political unity of Benin, but under their own influence and not that of the heads of other Bini chiefdoms. [115]

In the end, they failed in this endeavor, though the ultimate danger came not from their traditional rivals, the other chiefdoms, but from their own weapon, the Oba, or monarch. The fourth Oba succeeded in violently subordinating the Benin City leaders who had styled themselves “king-makers.” He deprived them of the right to bear symbols equal to those of the monarch or to confer titles, and restricted them to crowning each new king rather than choosing kings from among the royal family. He also “created a new category of title-holders as a counterbalance.” Before, Benin was a complex chiefdom in which one segment, the chiefdom that controlled Benin City, held preeminent influence over the other chiefdoms. The new monarchy constituted a qualitative change in which a ritual and administrative center wielded a unique and increasingly coercive power over all the segments, against them but also in concert with them, as each segment was led by heads who enjoyed a good deal of privilege and spiritual power.

The royal court employed a number of dignitaries and office-holders who acted as intermediaries between the Oba and the other people. In fact, the cross-culturally common taboo against supreme leaders relating freely with common people seems to be an effective mechanism, not only for creating a mystical status around a supreme leader, but also for ensuring the complexification of authority and the proliferation of courts (which are at least partially the predecessors of bureaucracies), and to allow the upper strata to isolate and control the supreme ruler.

On the other hand, the Benin megacommunity remained relatively stable for about six centuries, until its invasion by the British, without developing many characteristic features of the state, even though the qualitatively different authority of the Oba constituted a potential kernel of state power. The chiefs and paramount rulers did not generally interfere with subsistence activities, but on the contrary continued to favor communal values. Related to this, the central authority never developed strong coercive powers, and no social group ever achieved total dominance over the others. Most dignitaries and title-holders were officially non-hereditary and appointed by the Oba, but in practice they remained within the same families for centuries, thus they never came to support the paramount ruler over the communities. And in the communities, councils of elders continued to hold preeminence, though often balanced by the younger warriors, and so the different families remained more or less equal, and thus subsistence practices remained egalitarian and communal. The Oba had broken out of the constraints of a complex chiefdom—a type of alliance among chiefdoms that is typically short-lived—yet he did not develop state authority on other social fronts. The function of the paramount ruler remained religious, and his power was primarily symbolic. It symbolized the unity of all the chiefdoms and independent communities, therefore lending itself to a political stability that was spiritual rather than bureaucratic.

This peculiar balance, nonetheless, was arrived at by a power struggle between different loci of leadership, which is a dynamic that deserves further exploration. It is characteristic of state evolution that the emerging center of state authority must wage a bloody conflict against the power-holders in the preexisting political organization. Those prior leaders are generally complicit with politogenesis (sometimes unwittingly so) but in many specific instances will fight against state formation in order to hold onto their own power. Given such ambiguity, we can view non-state power-holders as conduits of the logic of power, which conditions them to push for innovations and forms of organization that encourage the further accumulation of power; at the same time they wish to hold onto power, even though the conditions that allow them to be power-holders must be superseded for power to accumulate further. Thus they favor the accumulation of power even as they oppose the organizational progress that higher intensities of power require.

In European history, the collaboration and conflict between monarchies and the bourgeoisie displays the same ambiguity. In this, we can see that the logic of power is both seductive and impersonal. As anarchists have long argued, though often hesitantly, metaphorically, or ambivalently, given the Western prejudice in favor of quantitative social science, power is a social force that must be analyzed as a protagonist of history. In fact, much of the behavior of capital as a social force is due to the extent to which it serves as a cover for power. Though it is more enticing as a subject of analysis due to its quantitative and objective pretensions, it derives its function from the symbolic value it is imbued with by a whole host of military, spiritual, administrative, and cultural institutions.

An analysis of power as an active value can also shed a clarifying light on other controversies regarding where to draw the line for the threshold of politogenesis. There is a debate among Early State anthropologists as to whether the ancient Greek poleis or “city-states” constituted states. Some, such as Moshe Berent, insist that they do not qualify, because they are structurally different from most other early states. Such argumentation puts definitions before phenomena and makes it harder to perceive atypical innovations that open up new pathways of development. The Greek poleis generated a great deal of theoretical and practical material that was drawn on by subsequent states and is still drawn on by states today. I don’t believe there was any similar transference of organizational principles to stateless societies. Therefore, if the Greek experience is more readily transferable to states than to stateless entities, are certain elements of decentralization enough to justify the poleis as stateless societies? If the supreme ruler in a typical early state wielded above all symbolic power, what is the problem if in the poleis that symbolic center were not occupied by a human claiming to represent the gods but by a divine principle itself: law?

Other scholars refute the arguments of Greek statelessness, pointing out that the proportion of bureaucrats in the poleis was comparable to the early Chinese state; that the proportion of slaves and other non-citizens was in fact a majority; that the private management of slaves is a commonplace in many states, and that the state did in fact control slaves used in silver-mining, construction, and bureaucratic functions; that accumulation through warfare rather than internal taxation was common in other early states as well; as was the rotation of authority, for example in Italian city-states and the Novgorod republic, which would even invite foreign officials to come act as temporary rulers. [116]

The example of the poleis also encourages us to break out of the artificially limited scope of analysis encouraged by the myopic mythology of nation-states, which tends to ignore the margins of a society and its neighbors. The commercial and military network of the Greeks constitutes the true terrain of each individual city-state. Since a state’s territorial boundaries are fictive in any case, we shouldn’t hesitate to look beyond Athens’s walls, or even beyond the plains of Attica, to measure the population and the forms of exploitation linked into that particular state system. The ancient Greek poleis organized their power in a space of flows rather than a space of places; therefore a systems analysis is best suited to understand the functioning of the states they created.

The Mediterranean provides an excellent terrain for such analysis, in fact. The fall of the Mycenaean state at the end of the Bronze Age opened up a specific socio-political space in which the Greek city-states later emerged. That collapse was part of a wave of invasions, revolutions, and catastrophes that spelled the end of a great many civilizations all across the eastern Mediterranean. The Late Bronze Age collapse occurred between 1206 and 1150 BCE and was marked by a sharp decline in trade, a widespread loss of written language, and the destruction of the overwhelming majority of cities in the region, from Phylos to Gaza, some of which were never resettled.

I believe the key to understanding this collapse is recognizing that all of these civilizations formed a shared world-system. Linguistics, as well as the Western inclination to break up reality into subjects (and corresponding objects or inert material) rather than understanding it as a question of fields and relationships, can prejudice us to view the region as being populated by “separate” cultures and polities: the Egyptians; the Assyrians; the Israelites; the Mycenaeans; and so forth. It is more accurate to understand these peoples and polities as different strands woven together in a complex fabric.

The Bronze Age collapse has been widely studied, and numerous causes have been proposed, from an increase in warfare and barbarian invasion, to climatic changes and volcanic eruptions, to economic collapse stemming from the exhaustion of the bronze supply (bronze-based industry, unlike the iron-based industry that followed it, required intense trade networks spanning a large geographic region). None of these explanations seems satisfying in its own right, and none enjoy a scientific consensus. Before suggesting another cause, I would like to problematize the concept of causation itself, at least in how it has traditionally been approached in scientific research.

Can we imagine that the periodic outbursts of insurrection, collapse, civil war, and revolution that at the present are occurring with an increasing frequency (Albania, Bolivia, Greece, Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, Brazil, etc.) eventually intensify to the point where they cause the collapse of the current world system? And what if ten thousand years went by, all electronic records were lost, and the only thing future researchers could uncover were climate data, some of the most basic chronologies of the major states, and some cursory information about economic practices?

Surely some would hypothesize that climate change were the cause of the collapse, others—unearthing cryptic references to the appearance of a bellicose class known as “terrorists” and discovering archaeological evidence of civil war in Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Libya, and Colombia—would suggest invasion and warfare. Others might posit peak oil or currency inflation. From the current standpoint, all of these explanations should strike us as unsatisfactory, precisely because they are all interrelated and none of them, precisely, is the cause of the increasing systemic insecurity we can feel. At least not in the way a chemical reaction can be identified as having a clean, simple, concrete cause. On the contrary, all of these factors contribute to the insecurity of the world system, that great fabric we are all wrapped up in. Each of these factors shakes and pulls at the fabric, causing growing instability, until any structures built atop the fabric collapse (or until the fabric itself is torn). In complex systems, it is instability and turmoil that cause systemic collapse and the spontaneous emergence of new systems. But instability is not just the sum of discrete forces acting on a static equilibrium. On the contrary, the instability comes to constitute a force in itself that triggers more destabilizing events. It unifies the total array of forces that cause individuals and communities to reproduce the dynamic equilibrium of the system or to rebel against it. These forces are economic, ecological, technological, political (in terms of administrative structures, discourses of legitimacy, and also relations of war/peace between polities), spiritual, and also psychosocial. This last, often ignored, and approaching what George Katsiaficas terms the “eros effect,” is undeniable on the ground: a society is most likely to rebel when the power structures that dominate it appear unstable, or when neighboring societies also rebel, no matter what their reasons. This explains why, starting at the end of 2008, social rebellions occurred with greater frequency, even in many countries where the economic crisis had only appeared in the news but not yet manifested in higher unemployment, or why there was a direct interplay and transference between insurrections and uprisings in Greece and Turkey—one country in economic recession and the other experiencing economic growth—or Greece and Bulgaria—one uprising inspired by anarchist values and the other by fascist values.

Assuming that we can understand systemic collapse in this light, I would like to suggest another factor (potentially the most important factor, although the data do not exist to prove this claim) for the Bronze Age collapse: internal rebellion and struggles for freedom.

I propose that we would attain a far more accurate view of history if, every time a state collapsed, we assumed rebellion was a principal cause, unless evidence existed for another cause. We know that states provoke resistance from their own subjects, and that struggles for freedom are universal (although visions of freedom and methods for attaining it are beyond any doubt historically and culturally specific). Too often, historians and archaeologists fabricate cheap mysteries, “Why did this great civilization suddenly collapse?,” because they refuse to accept the obvious: that states are odious structures that their populations destroy whenever they get the opportunity, and sometimes even when they face impossible odds.

The scholars of power are staring Ozymandias in the face. Beyond the anarchist intuition, which has proven accurate in its historical predictions enough times that anyone whose psyche is not integrally wrapped up with bootlicking should have taken note, we have a number of facts to back up this assertion. To start with, there are numerous documented examples of societies that overthrow state structures in order to organize themselves horizontally. Such records are typically from places like Amazonia or sub-Saharan Africa where anti-authoritarian popular cultures are conducive to the preservation of such histories.

But in other parts of the world, a shortage of evidence is not evidence that popular rebellions were not a major force of history. It is precisely the one factor that is least likely to leave archaeological evidence. It leaves no trace in climate records, it need not be preceded or even accompanied by any dramatic change in technologies and material remains, and the literate classes of pre-modern states are unlikely to put it down in writing. In fact, the disappearance of writing is a likely result of an anti-authoritarian revolution in a society in which written language is controlled by the elite. [117] Neighboring states that witnessed such revolutions might also be unlikely to discuss and document a popular uprising because they themselves were assuredly afflicted by the same conflicts and dangers. Anyone who participates in radical movements today knows that revolutionary episodes are systematically downplayed or erased from the official histories, and this despite the fact that modern states command much more complicated means that allow them to recuperate radical histories, reframing them in a way that legitimates state power. [118] Bronze Age states did not have such means at their disposal. The principal way for them to avoid fanning the flames of transregional rebellion would be to suppress the news.

And what of the wars and barbarian invasions? Chronicles of the Egyptian state mention a series of seafaring raiders as well as land-based invaders whom modern researchers named as the “Sea Peoples.” Probably originating from around the Aegean Sea, they warred with states in the areas of modern-day Turkey, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Their raiding was so calamitous that some scholars propose them as a cause for the Bronze Age collapse. It seems likely that some if not all of the Sea Peoples were stateless, and their warfare may have been in part motivated by hostility to the states of the region. The Egyptian, Hittite, and Mycenaean states, to name the principal players, were involved in a long-standing power play and scramble for resources that kept the region immersed in warfare, the worst consequences of which were born by the lower strata, the common people. And as we have seen, a major activity of state formation is slave-raiding and the capture of entire populations, which also leads to many people fleeing to zones of resistance (possibly in the mountains and islands that made up the Aegean and its borders). As the states grew in power and the liberated zones filled up, there would be more pressure on fugitive populations to fight back.

Evidence for the statelessness of the Sea Peoples includes their use of oral history and their lack of writing, which also denotes a lack of bureaucracy; their nomadism and extreme mobility; their apparent use of confederal alliances between different peoples; their impressive military efficiency without a corresponding founding of dynasties or cities (state societies that are militarily effective are invariably prolific founders and builders); their oscillation between warring against neighboring states and hiring themselves out as mercenaries. All of these are characteristics of stateless peoples at the time, at least in areas devastated by state effects.

If this is the case, the appearance of the Sea Peoples would constitute ethnogenesis, the creation of a new people or ethnic group, in this case one constituted by runaway slaves and fragments of communities fleeing the warfare and slave-raiding of states. Such a process constituted the preeminent model for revolution at the time. Without internationalism, freedom would have been an ethnic property. Unfortunately, as in the case of the nomadic empires, we have seen how such ethnicities can eventually shift from being the antagonists of states to the founders of states. The relative strength of the values of anti-authoritarianism, on the one hand, and militarism, on the other, as well as the presence or absence of patriarchy, probably determine whether a liberated people become a new politogen.

In any case, population after the fall of the Mycenaean civilization was continuous, but palaces and many towns were burnt down, and people became more nomadic, living in shifting settlements and supporting themselves to a greater extent with herd animals, particularly cattle. After a few centuries the new poleis emerged, agriculture pushed animal husbandry to the margins, slavery returned in force, commerce flourished, and warfare increased. The great civilization from which the West claims descent had arrived.

A broad popular rebellion destroying the prior civilization may explain the particular relationship of the Greek city-states with power. The military basis of their power comprised egalitarian formations of foot soldiers who used innovative tight formations to overcome cavalry and larger but less motivated imperial armies, together with an effectively deployed naval power, the backbone of which—the rowers—were also granted political rights and thus given a stake in victory. Anti-authoritarian societies and those that result from popular rebellions tend to be innovative and adept when it comes to warfare, and this may explain the Greek developments.

Such a military organization dethrones the nobility, who otherwise could cement their political dominance over the middle strata through their ability to field mounted troops for warfare. Noble or high-status families still existed in the Greek poleis, since their economy allowed for the private accumulation of wealth, based as it was on monetary exchange, alienated wealth from livestock to slaves, the erosion of collective values in favor of private property adhering to households, and a patriarchal system whereby male heads controlled the households and all their wealth. (Note that such a regime—familial private property—was still a far cry from the regime of individual private property that liberal ideologues seek to naturalize. I believe that familial private property derives from degraded systems of collective property in which popular values of sharing and community solidarity have eroded, or when situations of forced migration and crisis have weakened the community and favored the atomized family as a survival institution.)

The important Greek political concept of equality, therefore, was an alienated political equality rather than a holistic social equality, the same as it is in the representative democracies of today. Political equality is an authoritarian concept that encourages the constitution of a broad elite (based on the inclusion of all potentially elite sectors rather than an exclusionary process by which elite factions compete for absolute dominance, often destabilizing the system in the process). Factions in this broad elite may compete economically but they all must collaborate in the wielding of political and cultural power, with the aim of advancing a unified statist projectuality.

The poleis, therefore, rejected monarchs but not the sort of power that monarchs accumulated and wielded. Nobles, in this system, might achieve dominance for a time, especially if they could mobilize the middle classes against their rivals, but on principle the presence of a single ruler, a tyrant, was culturally proscribed and discouraged.

On an ethical plane, we can classify this vision of equality—the slaver’s equality—as hypocrisy, then and now. But in a historical light, we are looking at a very important governing strategy, and one that may reflect the reemergence of a state out of the ashes of the Mycenaean civilization. Successful popular rebellions often create an anti-authoritarian ethos. Perhaps, over three centuries, incipient elites used military brotherhoods and a resurgent patriarchy to establish a new kind of state authority. They did more than pay lip service to the anti-authoritarian ethos that may have thrived after the rebellion. They would have co-opted and modified it to protect their own interests as elites from the attempts of any single faction to achieve total domination, as in the prior despotic model. They also would have used it to mobilize a larger portion of their society—any candidate for “citizen” status, and thus the privileges of equality—to support the state project. After all, they would have needed a broader base of support at a time of material poverty and infrastructural weakness. And because “free” males are not the only agents of history, although reading most academic works you’d never guess, these conniving elites additionally had to protect themselves from a leveling rebellion by the others in their society who still championed the anti-authoritarian ethos. Therefore, they continued to vocally oppose a symbolic aspect of the prior state that was for them obsolete, the king, in order to cash in on and recuperate a rebellious popular culture. The leaders of the American and French revolutions did exactly that in order to create new states that were in the end far more authoritarian than the regimes they replaced.

The above is conjecture, but every element in the hypothesis has been documented in other processes of state formation. Whatever the trajectory, it was not universal. Much of the area remained stateless until invaded and conquered by the growing city-states.

Returning to the documented history and in particular to the anti-democratic figure of the tyrant, it is important to understand that a cultural proscription does not at all mean that what is proscribed will not be present in the society. Quite the contrary. Greek denigrations of tyranny tell us that it had no place in their ideal model of governance, but the historical record shows that in practice, the Greek democracies demonstrated a cyclical dependence on tyrants.

Majority rule requires an underlying consensus that whatever ritualized decision is produced will be respected by all. When this consensus breaks down, from the original democracies of the city-states to the representative democracies of today, a dictator steps in. Democratic mythology requires this dictator to be delegitimized, and indeed sometimes their motivation is personal power more than governmental stability, yet dictators provide institutional continuity where sometimes formal democracy cannot. They also have the extra-democratic ability to weaken or eliminate reformist factions that make the democratic consensus untenable, typically, those who stray too far from what is considered a centrist position. (Granted, this house-cleaning capacity is far more developed in modern dictatorships than it was in the Greek poleis.) Tyrants were like the paralegal Batman that every system of law and order needs to function; condemned and externalized to a marginal space of illegitimacy, but clearly present both in the imaginary and in the historical operation of the idealized model they shadow.

In the poleis, the tyrants made use of the same institutional forces as the assembly to mobilize resources and execute their decisions. To me, this interchangeability—take out the assembly, put the tyrant in its place, and the society keeps functioning—constitutes an important test: compatibility. The fact that the poleis pass this test proves that the assembly and the dictator function within the same democratic logic. On the contrary, truly stateless societies, saddled with a president, a chief, or an assembly of male, slave-owning citizens, will either ignore the addition (probably, the people would kill or exile them if they attempted to assert their authority), or the entire social fabric would have to be reengineered, because it contains no features or interfaces compatible with the operation of the statist institution. Give the !Kung a Department of Transportation, and there will be a total disconnect, as the !Kung do not traditionally have taxation, or highways, or a cultural acceptance of bureaucratic chains of command.

The compatibility test also works to differentiate states functioning according to mutually exclusive logics. Would a Han bureaucracy function in Napoleonic France? The thought experiment could provide some useful analysis. The Catholic Church, for certain, could not have replaced the religious institutions in an African state based on ancestor cults; the former has no interface with formal kinship systems. The fact of compatibility between dictator and assembly in the ancient Greek poleis demonstrates what most social scientists and historians, thanks to their conditioning by democratic mythology, will never be able to see: that these two institutions constitute part of the same political system, just as they do in parliamentary democracies today.